‘Susie,’ he said, softly, ‘you are losing time. Don’t you know there is an evening train?’ CHAPTER XIII. THE DARKNESS THAT COULD BE FELT. John rose late next morning to a changed world. It no longer seemed to be of any importance what he did. For the first time in his life he got up in the forenoon and breakfasted as late as if he had been a fashionable young man with nothing to do. He was not fashionable indeed, but there was no longer any occupation that claimed him. He had nothing to do. He flung himself on his sofa, after the breakfast, which he had no heart to touch, had been taken away. What did it matter what he did now? He had not slept till morning. He was fagged and jaded, as if he had been travelling all night. Travelling all night! that was nothing, not worth a thought. How often had he stepped out of a train, and, after his bath and his breakfast, rushed off to the office with his report of what he had been doing, as fresh as if he had passed the night in the most comfortable of beds! that was nothing. Very, very different was it to lie all night tossing, with a fever swarm of intolerable thoughts going through and through your head, and to rise up to feel yourself without employment or vocation, to see the world indifferently swinging on without you, when you yourself perhaps had thought that some one train of things, at least, would come to a dead stand without you. But there was no stoppage visible anywhere. It was he who had stopped like a watch that has run down, but everything else went on as before.